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Magazine Château de Versailles N°31

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Magazine Château de Versailles N°31

A symbolic conquest

By choosing Versailles as a national history exhibition site, Louis Philippe I was not aiming merely to emphasise his own political power. Indeed, the monarch was the first, after Napoleon, to reconcile two opposing tendencies in the wake of the French Revolution. What better backdrop than the royal residence, involved in the first dramatic events of 1789, to recount fifty years of upheaval. Beyond that ambition, the Palace of Versailles was also to become once again the unique symbol of France that it had already been under the reign of the Sun King.

(David Chanteranne, Editor-in-chief of Palace of Versailles. From the Ancien Régime to the present day)